html clickable links in item descriptions

[craftsbydan]

I'm aware of the new requirements by ebay for inserting clickable links in item descriptions and have properly done so as instructed by the great article by Kathy Terrill & Kathy Keefe.  I am trying to provide a link within my item description to my ebay store.  The links are clickable and work great, however, when clicked on, an ebay message says "Oops, there is a problem but the problem is ours, not yours because ebay's server is down and will be solved soon."   This has been going on for at least 2 weeks and I still get the same message as of today 2/17/19.  I have tried with 7 or 8 times and with different item description pages to no avail.

If and when ebay corrects the server problem, how do I bulk list the link to all of my items using ebays' bulk lister?  I am aware of how to bulk list additions or corrections to standard listings, but html links seem to require a different method.  Would appreciate answers from knowledgeable members . Thanks very much.

[craftsbydan]

As a follow up to my post "Html clickable links in item descriptions" I wanna add as a reference that numerous ebay sellers have these links in item descriptions such as the one found in all item descriptions of ebay seller (egberts treasures)

[juststuffisell]

welp, you could always go to one of these other seller listings with internal links and view the source to see how they have their link coded and just duplicate that. I don't link within my listings to my store anymore so I can't recall how I formatted the link.


Cheers

[craftsbydan]

I know well how to create the links , just need to know why ebay is saying the problem is not mine but their server is down.

[coffeebean832]

@craftsbydan 

Can you provide an item number that's experiencing this problem? It's hard to advise without seeing the listing.

[berserkerplanet]

The category link and the "Visit Store:" link in the description section of this listing work fine for me using Firefox 3.6.24, 31, or 52. https://www.ebay.com/itm/173174582471

But those are part of the store banner/headers and not in the description body, where I assume you are having the issue.

Post a link to one of your listings with the clickable link you insert.


(That listing also has broken font tags at the end. I didn't look at any others.)

[craftsbydan]

OK, I finally got the link working. The instructions that I followed to enter a store link in my description did no say to use (") at the end of my store link. I added the (") and now I have a working link to my store.  NOW, using ebay's bulk lister, how do I get that link to all of my 700 items.   Been here on ebay 19 years and have done a lot of bulk listing replacing words, adding sentences etc. in the standard method. But how do I bulk list HTML links? The item where I have placed the workable link to my store is here:   https://www.ebay.com/itm/311440211261  Thanks.

[pocomocomputing]

@shipscript 

Tagging her to come visit this topic and your issues.

This member knows HTML and eBay use of it in descriptions better than eBay staff! She has made many great tools for eBay sellers. Perhaps she will drop by and look at your listing and your other listings to offer suggestions and improvements and explanations for your issue.

[craftsbydan]

Thanks very much.   In case the link in my previous message don't work, the item in reference that has the store link is item# 311440211261

[shipscript]

@craftsbydan

To bulk repair your broken links using eBay's bulk editor

find

href="https://www.ebay.com/str/signsbycraftsbydan target=" _blank"=""

and replace with

href="https://www.ebay.com/str/signsbycraftsbydan" target=" _blank"

Or you could manually repair that HTML in these 5 listings:

171906515666
172386206782
311440211261
311781163362
311803473471

Appending content is difficult unless you can replace something. Otherwise you would use eBay's "add to description" but we don't like the placement of that content.

So I'm looking at the text at the end of your listing and hoping it is consistently constructed across all listings, allowing us to find and replace that text:

Thanks very much.

replace with

Thanks very much. <br><br>
<a href="https://www.ebay.com/str/signsbycraftsbydan" target="_blank">CLICK HERE to see all our signs</a>

A bulk scan using the CustomCapture of the ActiveContentScanner shows that text appearing in all but these 8 listings, which you must manually edit to append your Store link.

173711296197
311435181161
311537298626
311732498800
311815889716
311903917702
311913150620
312403816067

[berserkerplanet]

[I crossposted with shipscript, but will leave the following anyway]

The link to the listing in your post is broken due to trailing invisible characters (happens in the forums sometimes if not careful and maybe hit space bar after pasting link I believe)

Anyway, looked at that listing. The new store link works fine.

Link href attributes are ALWAYS enclosed in " ". Not sure where you got the bad advice 🙂

That listing has multiple broken/messed up HTML tags which may cause problems in some browsers (they are visible in Firefox 3.6.24) You may have tried adding HTML to the end of the description using the bulk editor and it has created a mess.

Thanks very much.</font></font></font></font><br></div>
<br <font="" rwr="1" size="4" ='font-family:arial'<br=""></font>
<a href="https://www.ebay.com/str/signsbycraftsbydan" target="_blank">
CLICK HERE to see all our signs</a>

That

<br <font="" rwr="1" size="4" ='font-family:arial'<br=""></font>

part is messed up and needs to be removed, but if not consistent won't be removable wit hthe bulk editor, and may not be removable with it anyway (bulk editor doesn't like split tagsets and not sure what it would do with that.)

There are two nested

<div id="ds_div"> >/div>

tagsets and I don't think that should ever happen (those are wrappers and part of eBay's description framework, and I believe HTML/CSS explicitly prohibit more than one element with the same ID. Resulting behavior unknown. Another listing had 5 of those nested with <font rwr="1"... tags also multiply nested in those.

I was going to suggest you manually copy your listing text from the rich text tab of each listing while revising them, sanitize it to plain text, paste it back in, and then switch back to the HTML tab for further work, but you have 702 listings, I suspect they all may be corrupted in that way to some degree, and that mess can't be bulk edited since it's a moving target and not consistent across the listings.

Maybe shipscript can help you clean them up - she is a wiz at this stuff and has the tools and the technology.

[I think you need to clean the listings up before attempting to tack more HTML (your store link) on to the end of them - not even sure trying to use the bulk editor to append that link will work at this point.]

Sorry for the disjointed reply, but I don't even know how to proceed at this point as I see so much wrong - and stuff I haven't seen before with those div elements.

I would stop messing with the listings until help comes along - the bulk editor may cause further damage depending on what you try to do.

[shipscript]

@craftsbydan 

Are all of your descriptions identical? It might make sense to bulk replace them all with clean versions. Consider that possibility and consider what new text you might use. eBay's bulk editor is not up to this task, but this can be easily handled in bulk through eBay's File Exchange. All you would need to do is upload a revision file to File Exchange. We can help you prepare that file. It would consist of every active item number and the new description.

[berserkerplanet]

@shipscript

What's you take on the multiple wrapper divs and mangled tag sets tangled in them? Have you ever seen that before?

After thinking about it, it's not even possible for OP to have created that problem - only exception (that serves no purpose) would be to have explicitly looked at the frame source and deliberately inserted the extra duplicate div id="ds_div" tags. Then revision cycles would cause insertion of additional <font rwr="1" tag sets when eBay got confused. Not sure about the mangled tags though.

Something ain't right here and it looks like eBay might have caused all/a lot of that corruption.

Am I missing something?

[shipscript]

@berserkerplanet 

Embedded eBay wrappers can occur when someone copies the rendered face of a listing into a new listing — a  copy/paste directly out of a listing instead of through sell-similar. I do see it occasionally. It shouldn't be an issue. I see duplicate turbo lister wrappers the same way.

The rules of HTML are that the first duplicate attribute takes precedence. Thus, the first or outer div will be recognized as the eBay wrapper ID by HTML anchors and javascript.  The rules of CSS are that the last value for a duplicated style attribute takes precendence. But since the ID is a target and not a style, CSS will treat both IDs as valid targets for styling purposes.  I do see duplicate IDs set up specifically for CSS styling, and that would be valid.

As for the mangled code, that is usually the result of manually editing the HTML. Code can get out of order by pasting copied segments into the rich text editor, but the kind of entanglement you are discussing is typically due to hand editing a copy/paste directly in the HTML.

The broken and stray tags can create a problem in rendering within some browsers. It just depends on the severity of the damage and what healing processes those browsers are using. We know that the Firefox/Gecko/Mozilla rendering engine and the Chrome/Webkit rendering engine will heal differently. 

If there is not much going on in the code block (not a lot of color or formatting), then stray or unclosed tags have very little effect.  Additionally, the reason eBay puts user code inside a table is that table code is designed to terminate unkempt code, as long as the miscreant code is not itself table code.

[craftsbydan]

Wow, you guys are real intellects. Never would I have known all this and have to say I don't totally understand all you're saying about stray tags, wrappers, etc.  Yes, all my description pages of all 700+ items are identical.  Except for maybe 7 or 8,  ALL were created by ebays" "sell similar".  This is the easy method due to all descriptions actually being identical and therefor only change needed on listing new items is the title and store category.  Insofar as I causing any problems with the html, I only attempted to manually add the link of subject to maybe 6 or 7 items.  When testing of adding the html with the bulk lister, I only highlite 2 items at one time. I know never to highlite entire pages until I see that it works.  It did not work on the 2 items, so I went no further.  As far as inserting html, I only inserting it on item 311440211261 and none others.   I do use firefox and do know that I haven't had any problems that could be caused by messed-up html as you have detected on all items.  Being that the above mentioned item has the only working link, do I simply  copy that link from it's html and paste it in the bulk lister using the bulk lister and then select the listers' HTML method vs using the default STANDARD.  I do agree that in the bulk lister, using copy & replace is much better than adding and also agree with you that I should insert by replacing the last 3 words of my description. In your opinions, are the above methods of bulk listing the right way to go or can I just copy the link from the description without using HTML? Thanks very very much.